I arrived back in Mijas with needles still stuck to the hem of my coat. Pine needles. Real ones — not the bald artificial kind I always said I’d never allow in the house, until I caved that one year when Brian was in hospital and everything else felt too hard. But this year was different. This year I went full Christmas traditionalist: holly branches, red candles, mince pies from scratch. A kind of frantic festivity. Maybe overcompensating, maybe grieving in disguise. Probably both.
The house in Connemara still smells like peat smoke and lavender drawer liners. I left a slice of Christmas cake wrapped in wax paper on the table — “for the fairies,” I told Mam, who rolled her eyes but left it untouched. She always did believe in things she claimed not to.
The flight back was delayed. Two crying toddlers, one sneezing teenager, and the kind of turbulence that makes you reconsider all your bad decisions. But the second I stepped outside Málaga airport and smelled that weird mixture of diesel, orange blossom, and sea air… something in me relaxed. My whole body — like a damp root finally drying out.
It’s not exactly spring here, not yet, but the garden’s pretending it is. The rosemary is blooming — electric blue — and the last of the calendula are still hanging on like tipsy party guests who haven’t realised the music’s stopped. And me? I’m kneeling in the dirt with a second-hand sketchpad from the charity shop and a set of garden plans drawn in thick, wobbly pencil.
This isn’t a normal garden design. I haven’t a clue what I’m doing, really. I’m not Monty Don. I’m just a widowed woman with a temperamental knee and too many seed packets. I’ve written “wild edges” in the margins. I’ve circled “sitting spot for tea (or wine)” twice. I’ve drawn a weird lopsided heart over where I think the raised beds should go. It looks like a potato.
I want it to feel soft and open. Not perfectly pruned — God no — but somewhere that invites mess. Growth. Strangeness. That in-between space where you can drink tea at sunrise and cry without scaring the rosemary.
Brian would’ve hated it. No structure. No symmetry. He was tidy, precise — even his daffodils grew in obedient little rows. But I don’t want obedient. I want riotous. Bees and butterflies and whatever Spanish equivalent there is of the Irish hoverfly. I want surprises. A peach tree that shouldn’t survive but does. A compost bin that somehow becomes a conversation starter.
This week I bought three terracotta pots from a woman in the Thursday market — one of them cracked, which she said was “for character” and then winked like we shared a secret. I put lemon balm in the largest one and left it near the kitchen door, hoping the scent will remind me to breathe more slowly.
At night, the garden sounds different than Ireland. No wind howling off the Atlantic, just crickets and the occasional cat fight near the bins. Sometimes I sit outside in Brian’s old hoodie with a glass of vermouth and pretend I’m braver than I feel.
But there’s something happening.
Something stirring.
A kind of tentative hope, like when a seed pushes through dry earth and says, in its own stubborn way, “I’m going to try.”
Maybe that’s all this is. A trying. A sketchbook full of maybe-plans. A cracked pot filled with lemon balm. A garden that’s not quite a garden yet. A life that’s not quite settled, but definitely — finally — unfurling.